Recaping ’07 Election Day Storm

The snow began to fall early Tuesday morning and it was a heavy, wet dense snow. Combine that with the fact that most of the trees still had their leaves and we had very strong gusty winds of 30 to 40 mph. All this together put excessive weight and stress on trees and power lines which caused trees and limbs to break and power lines to snap and come down. This left 15,000 homes and business with out power at the peak of the snow event. As of Wednesday evening there are still people without power across the region and crews are continuing to work to get the lights and heat back on.

The total for this snow event was 3.5″ out at the Erie International Airport. Downtown Erie where I live there was 2.5″ at its peak. You go out to Wattsburg and French Creek, NY there was a foot of snow. Summit Twp, in Erie County, had 11″; Edinboro around 4″ and Meadville with 2″.

The winds are expected to become more southerly Wednesday night and this will allow the lake snow machine to turn off. Another clipper could Friday could bring some light snow and rain showers but don’t think it will be any where close to what we saw on Tuesday.

There was a comment today on another Erie Blog about the power outage and one of their commenters mentioned that, “Just for the record, this storm is one of the (if not the) worst first-snow-of-the-season that I can remember.” This got me thinking and so I decided to explore some of the weather history we have in our weather office. Unfortunately I do not know if these are the “First-snow-of-the-season” events, but here are some events that were noted from the start of October up to yesterday’s date (November 6th)

1 response so far ↓

Thanks for posting my picture. Although things are a whole lot better today we sure did have several anxious hours on Tuesday. As the snow continued to fall heavier and faster we were very concerned about this big Norway maple in our front yard. It doesn’t shed it’s leaves with all the ” normal ” maple trees in the fall, sometimes hanging on till well into December. We have our electric and cable TV lines traveling through the tree from the house to the pole, and the heavy snow laden limbs were weighting them down. We were fearful they would snap at any moment. Fortunately our son came after work with his pole chain saw and cut some of the branches that were causing all the grief. The mighty maple now has a few bare spots, but I know it will recover, and become beautiful again next spring providing it can get it’s act together and drop those leaves while we still have time to rake before another storm comes our way.